Menu

Menu

History

Currency, Caffeine and Codeathons
3/27/2007 – Rich Vazquez and Tom Brown present at Cafe Caffeine in Austin, Texas. Greg Foster attends. They discuss how complementary currency software should be open source. (Credit to Douglas Rushkoff for the phrase “Open Source Currency”)
4/11/2007 – Rich, Greg, Tom decide to go with ruby on rails over php. They determined that working with data was easier with rails objects, they impressed with the rails console and the codeathon was a good opportunity to learn more about rails.
4/20/2007 – Codeathon: project named austen. This was organized by Silona Bonewald and the League of Technical Voters. Part of the bylaws of LOTV is that all code must be open source. The project name is an acronym for Austin Time Exchange Network.
8/2007 – Project renamed to oscurrency.

Going Live
7/2009 – The new Bay Area Community Exchange goes live with oscurrency
7/24/2009 – First OpenTransact screencast
8/29/2009 – Rich and Tom present “Using Insoshi to Support Community Currencies” at Lonestar Ruby Conference 2009
9/2009 – Lee Azzarello starts adding Heroku deployment feature to oscurrency. This allows for much easier deployments and adds a common deployment procedure so that not everyone has to roll their own or have their own unique deployment bugs.

Upgrades
3/2010 – Internationalization. Rails 2.2 (11/21/2008) added support for internationalization (i18n). This allows a developer to remove the text from the web pages and replace them with labels which will display text in a different language depending on which locale is chosen as long as the developer provides a configuration file for that language which indexes the labels to the text for that language.
4/2010 – Mike Travers makes oscurrency more Heroku friendly by switching search and background processing components
5/2010 – Oscurrency switches to authlogic for authentication. The original authentication that came with insoshi allowed you to retrieve the password from the database. If someone gets access to the database and the encryption key, then they can get all the passwords. authlogic hashes the passwords so that this attack is no longer possible. Instead of comparing passwords, hashes of passwords are compared. Authlogic also makes it easy to support standards and custom encryption schemes.